Analysis of "Twilight in Delhi" by Ahmed Ali
Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) is a richly textured modernist novel that captures the cultural, political, and emotional disintegration of Muslim life in Delhi during the early twentieth century under British colonial rule. At once a social chronicle, a lament, and a carefully constructed symbolic narrative, the novel presents the decline of an entire way of life through the intertwined fates of its characters, particularly the ageing patriarch Mir Nihal and his son Asghar. Through the deliberate interplay of symbolic imagery, generational conflict, and a consistently melancholic narrative tone, Ali creates an elegy for the fading Muslim aristocratic culture that once flourished in Delhi. In doing so, he offers both a portrait of individual lives and a broader meditation on the erosion of tradition under the relentless pressures of modernity and imperial domination.
The world of Twilight in Delhi is steeped in history, tradition, and ritual. Ahmed Ali painstakingly reconstructs a Delhi whose architecture, festivals, language, and customs are infused with centuries of Indo-Muslim culture. Yet from the outset, the novel presents this culture as fragile, already in decline, its survival precarious in the face of British colonial authority. The 1911 Delhi Durbar, staged by the British to celebrate the coronation of King George V as Emperor of India, becomes a key historical and symbolic backdrop. This grand imperial spectacle marks both the literal and figurative occupation of the city’s cultural space, displacing the symbols of Mughal sovereignty and signalling the British appropriation of Delhi’s identity. The novel’s portrayal of the Durbar is laced with irony: the pomp and pageantry mask the underlying dispossession and humiliation of the city’s Muslim elite, whose own festivals and ceremonies are now subject to colonial oversight and disruption.
At the heart of the novel’s elegiac vision is Mir Nihal, a representative of the old Muslim gentry. Mir Nihal’s life is rooted in values of honour, tradition, and a certain aristocratic dignity. His habits morning pigeon flying, storytelling, religious observance, the maintenance of a strictly regulated household, the rhythms of a world ordered by custom and inherited codes. Mir Nihal’s pigeons are particularly significant as a symbol: they embody both his love of freedom and his deep connection to an older Delhi that moves in harmony with its seasons and its past. His rooftop pigeon-flying is a serene, almost meditative activity that recalls a time when life was not dictated by colonial bureaucracies or the encroachment of Western commercial culture. Yet the fate of these pigeons, and the eventual dismantling of his dovecote, mirrors the destruction of the traditional order itself. As the novel progresses, the pigeons become a metonym for Mir Nihal’s own declining vitality and the crumbling edifice of the culture he cherishes.
Mir Nihal’s son Asghar represents the generational shift that is central to Ali’s exploration of cultural decay. Asghar is drawn to modernity, fashion, and romantic ideals influenced by Westernised notions of love and selfhood. He is fascinated by new styles of dress, Western perfumes, and the idea of love marriages rather than arranged unions dictated by family interests. His infatuation with Bilqeece and his insistence on marrying her despite his family’s reservations illustrate his rejection of certain traditional norms. While Asghar is not entirely divorced from the world of his parents, he retains a sense of refinement and a love of beauty he is far less anchored in the communal and religious life that sustains Mir Nihal. To Mir Nihal, Asghar’s desires signal not merely a personal rebellion but a symptom of the cultural drift toward individualism and away from the collective values of the past. The father-son relationship thus becomes a microcosm of the larger conflict between old Delhi’s traditions and the seductive pull of colonial modernity.
This generational conflict is not portrayed in purely moralistic terms; rather, Ali presents it with a tragic inevitability. Asghar is both a product of his time and a victim of it. He inhabits a hybrid cultural space in which British colonial influence reshapes aspirations, aesthetics, and even emotional life. The emerging middle-class sensibility that Asghar embodies is tinged with restlessness and dissatisfaction, qualities that disrupt the stability of traditional familial roles. His preoccupation with romance, personal fulfillment, and self-expression reflects a shift away from the duty-bound existence of his father’s generation. Yet Asghar’s modernity is not wholly liberating; it leaves him vulnerable to disillusionment, alienation, and the loss of communal bonds. His story suggests that the embrace of modernity under colonial conditions entails not an expansion of freedom but a reconfiguration of dependency and cultural displacement.
The symbolic structure of Twilight in Delhi deepens this thematic exploration of cultural erosion. The twilight of the title is itself a rich metaphor: it evokes the end of a day, a time of fading light, and by extension the decline of an era. Twilight suggests beauty and melancholy in equal measure it is a moment when the world is still suffused with color yet moving inexorably toward darkness. This twilight is both literal and figurative, marking the waning of Muslim political and cultural dominance in Delhi and the onset of a night in which the British colonial order reigns supreme. By choosing twilight rather than night as his dominant metaphor, Ali captures the bittersweet quality of the historical moment: the old order has not yet vanished entirely, but its survival is already impossible.
The changing seasons function as another layer of symbolism. The novel’s cyclical movement through Delhi’s summers, monsoons, and winters mirrors the natural passage of time, yet each seasonal return is shadowed by a sense of loss. Festivals that once embodied communal joy now seem muted, overshadowed by political subjugation and social change. The arrival of spring, traditionally associated with renewal, carries only a fragile hope, quickly undercut by the awareness that no season can restore what has been irretrievably lost. In this way, seasonal change becomes a counterpoint to the novel’s sense of irreversible historical decline. Nature continues its cycles, but culture does not: traditions, once broken, cannot be restored merely by the turning of the year.
Among the most poignant recurring symbols is the motif of pigeons, which, as noted earlier, represents freedom, continuity, and the fragile beauty of tradition. Mir Nihal’s devotion to his pigeons is not a mere hobby; it is a ritual that connects him to the city’s rooftops, skies, and history. The pigeons’ flights are graceful arcs across a familiar landscape, uniting the past and present in moments of pure, uncolonized joy. But the destruction of the dovecote by colonial authorities ostensibly for sanitary or administrative reasons embodies the British intrusion into even the most private corners of indigenous life. The pigeons, like Delhi’s Muslim culture, are displaced from their home and stripped of their freedom to roam as they once did. Their loss marks not only the diminishment of Mir Nihal’s personal world but the symbolic dismantling of an entire tradition of leisure, artistry, and gentle mastery over one’s environment.
Ali’s narrative tone is consistently melancholic, suffused with nostalgia and an acute awareness of transience. The novel is not merely descriptive; it is elegiac in structure and feeling. The narrator frequently lingers over details of architecture, clothing, and ceremonial life, as though seeking to preserve them in memory against the forces of time and political change. The tone is never strident or polemical; instead, it conveys loss through accumulation of sensory detail, the gradual dimming of vitality, and the juxtaposition of past glory with present diminution. In its refusal to idealise either past or present completely, the tone reinforces the sense that the novel is both an act of mourning and a subtle critique of the forces that have made mourning necessary.
The modernist style of Twilight in Delhi amplifies this elegiac tone. While Ahmed Ali’s prose is rich and lyrical, it is also fragmentary at times, capturing moments of subjective consciousness, sensory impressions, and fleeting emotions. This modernist tendency toward impressionism aligns with the novel’s thematic interest in impermanence. Ali structures the narrative less as a tightly plotted sequence than as a tapestry of interwoven moments, seasons, and perspectives. This approach allows him to evoke the texture of life in Delhi while also mirroring the way memory itself works, selective, associative, prone to dwelling on certain images while letting others fade.
In the depiction of Mir Nihal’s decline, the erosion of traditional values is rendered with an almost tactile sadness. His household, once governed by strict codes and rhythms, becomes increasingly porous to outside influences. The younger generation’s engagement with Western dress, language, and manners seeps into the domestic sphere, subtly altering the relationships within it. Religious observances continue but lack the unquestioned centrality they once had; respect for elders is eroded by new ideals of personal autonomy. Mir Nihal himself, though dignified and resistant, is forced to witness the crumbling of the social edifice that gave his life meaning. His loss is not only political but existential: the very language in which he understands the world no longer suffices to order the new reality.
Asghar’s trajectory is the inverse of his father’s: where Mir Nihal begins with certainty and loses it, Asghar begins with restless longing and ends in disillusionment. His love for Bilqeece, initially cast as a modern romantic choice, is eventually thwarted by the realities of life. His desires, shaped by colonial modernity’s ideals of self-fashioning and romantic fulfilment, cannot be fully realised within the constraints of his society, constraints that are themselves being reshaped by colonial power. In this way, Asghar’s personal disappointment becomes an emblem of a larger historical impasse: modernity under colonialism offers no stable ground for self-definition, leaving individuals caught between incompatible worlds.
The tension between old Delhi and colonial influences is not depicted as a simple binary of resistance versus collaboration. Rather, Ali shows that colonial modernity seeps into everyday life through commerce, education, administration, and even leisure. English words creep into Urdu conversations; imported goods find their way into households; new forms of entertainment displace older ones. The novel captures the complexity of cultural change, showing how the erosion of tradition is as much the result of internal adaptation as of external imposition. Yet the underlying power asymmetry is never forgotten: British colonial authority remains the ultimate arbiter, capable of dismantling dovecotes, regulating public gatherings, and redefining the meaning of public space.
This asymmetry underscores the tragic dimension of the novel’s central relationships. Mir Nihal and Asghar are not merely father and son at odds over lifestyle choices; they are emblematic of two historical moments in collision. Mir Nihal embodies a world that assumed its own continuity, grounded in the political and cultural sovereignty of Muslims in Delhi. Asghar inhabits a world in which that sovereignty is gone, replaced by the need to navigate a hybrid, dependent identity within a colonial framework. Their inability to fully understand one another is thus structural, rooted in the very conditions of their existence.
The pigeons, the twilight, and the seasons together create a symbolic network that reinforces the novel’s elegiac vision. The pigeons stand for continuity and the possibility of grace within tradition; their loss signals the shattering of that continuity. Twilight marks the irreversible passage from one historical epoch to another, suffused with beauty but leading into darkness. Seasonal change offers a reminder of nature’s cycles but also of the disjunction between natural renewal and cultural decay. Together, these symbols allow Ali to evoke loss in a way that is sensuous, poetic, and historically grounded.
Ultimately, Twilight in Delhi functions as an elegy not simply because it mourns the passing of a way of life, but because it enacts the work of mourning in its very structure and style. The narrative dwells on what is gone or going, lingers over details that might otherwise be forgotten, and resists the rush of history by rendering it in slow, deliberate prose. The modernist fragmentation of the text mirrors the fragmentation of the culture it depicts; the melancholic tone embodies the emotional weight of living through decline. Yet within this elegy, there is also a quiet act of preservation: by writing Twilight in Delhi, Ahmed Ali inscribes in literature what colonial modernity threatened to erase.
The novel’s power lies in its refusal to offer easy resolutions. Mir Nihal cannot halt the erosion of his world; Asghar cannot find fulfilment in the new one. The pigeons will not return, twilight will deepen into night, and the old Delhi will continue to recede into memory. Yet by attending so closely to the textures of life in this transitional moment, Ali allows readers to grasp both what was lost and why it mattered. His elegy is not merely a lament for a vanished past but an invitation to understand the complex interplay of history, culture, and identity in a time of profound change. In this way, Twilight in Delhi stands as both a literary masterpiece and a vital historical document, a work that captures the twilight of a culture with the nuance, sympathy, and artistry it deserves.